The dangers of SALT
Charles Douglas-Home
What is West Europe to make of SALT II? A treaty spawned by a democratically weak President and a physically moribund dictator cannot claim good breeding, even • before one looks at its detailed characteristics. In fact, the idea of strategic arms talks between Russia and the United States goes back 17 years to a famous speech at Ann Arbor, Michigan, by the then Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara. He wanted to Open a dialogue with the Russian leadership, whom the Kennedy administration thought were dangerously primitive in their approach to nuclear strategy. The 1962 Cuba crisis followed soon afterwards, and had two main effects. First it convinced the Americans that a world of nuclear weapons created the need for 'crisis management' in Which it was necessary to establish a common interest between the two major nuclear powers, underpinned by 'a permanent means of communication with Moscow. Hence the hotline, then the test-ban treaty, and finally the first session of strategic arms talks (SALT I) in 1969. Secondly, the Cuba crisis convinced the Russians that they must rectify their nuclear inferiority then so painfully revealed and, if dialogue helped them to do that, well and good. So, from the start, the two sides had a completely different idea of what the talks were for. One intended, from a position of superiority, to share this power; the other, from inferiority, to assert it. That difference has remained. The one common attitude throughout, on both sides, has been to exclude the rest of the world from having any say in their deliberations. The first SALT was opened in Helsinki in 1969 and signed in Vladivostock in 1972. It lapsed in 1977; but both sides have continued to act as though it were still in force — an eloquent indication of how empty and painless to them both its provisions must have been in the first place. Before SALT I expired President Carter, newly in office, sent his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to Moscow to make a completely different kind of proposal based largely on the idea of a straight cut in armaments, without the special esoteric flavour of exclusivity which attaches to talks about nuclear systems pos sessed only by the two super powers. Vance was brusquely dismissed by the Russians. It was not long before Carter came into line and agreed to discuss SALT II in the form and structure demanded by Moscow.
The Americans may now claim that, in the course of negotiating this treaty, they have either secured enough advantages to make it worth while, or laid the groundwork for achieving the objectives which comprised Vance's abortive proposals. But that cannot obscure the fact that it is the kind of treaty they did not want and did not propose. The first round goes to Moscow. A second point to remember about SALT is that, though the debate about it in the West concentrates predominantly on the nuclear arithmetic and the defence implications, it is an almost entirely political document as far as the Soviet Union is concerned. I visited Moscow last October at a time when the Russians were hoping for an imminent conclusion to the SALT negotiations. Every Russian official to whom I spoke made it clear that SALT was of extreme psychological importance to the Russians, far in excess of any economic saving from arms reduction, or increased nuclear security.
In the course of many conversations, it became evident that SALT was more important to the Russians for the status it confers on them, and for the legitimacy they think that it gives to the notion that they and the United States are joint-chairmen of the world. They would, therefore, have to be taken into account as partners or competitors of the US wherever it is active. The threats about the consequences of a failure of SALT were much less directed to the danger of a nuclear war than to the political conclusions — about the abandonment of so-called 'detente' — which they would draw from such a failure.
These conclusions were that the competition between the East and West — which they have always conducted as fiercely as ever but under the cant-laden cry of 'peaceful coexistence' — would somehow intensify. It would indeed intensify; but only because the enormous Soviet arms build-up, the expansionist militarism of East Germany and Cuba, and the many and varied attempts to subvert the West and any third world regime favourable to the West, would no longer have the rhetorical cloak of 'peaceful coexistence' to conceal their true intention from gullible Western minds.
SALT, however, does not make the world a safer place. When two drunks agree to consume only three bottles of liquor instead of four, it does not make them any less drunk. There are still more than enough nuclear weapons in the world to blow us all to dust; and there always will be. Indeed, it is not limitations of future programmes or any marginal change in the arithmetic of nuclear arsenals which hold the key to our safety. It is the manner in which those weapons which exist might be used, and the philosophy behind their use. In this context SALT is just another stage in a long process. There have been nine individual summits between Soviet and American leaders, and to judge from the statements which accompanied the Vienna meeting, both sides have a vested interest in institutionalising this arrangement.
When McNamara spoke in 1962, he hoped to start a process of public education of the Soviet leadership in the disciplines of nuclear strategy. The Kennedy administration had a kind of know-all approach to nuclear weapons which persuaded them that their technological expertise contrasted favourable with the Russians' relative technical ignorance, and also made the Americans better strategists. Washington prided itself on the fact that the ethics and techniques of nuclear warfare had become so awful and unprecedented that it was necessary to wean the Russians from their
•
more primitive ideas of grand strategy by encouraging a 'dialogue' with a new set of strategic rituals which would take over from more traditional philosophies.
The Russians thought otherwise. They are sound strategists and they work on sound if ruthless application of basic strategic principles. Their heads were not turned by improved technology, but, in 1962, they recognised their technical inferiority to the United States; since then they have brilliantly exploited the strategic arms talks until they can now claim some genuine basis of parity, at least with the big weapons systems.
American policy has reflected the view that nuclear weapons somehow deserve a grand strategy of their own — divorced from politics and war among lesser mortals, and ushering us instead into a world of 'dialogue' and 'exchange'. The Rtissians, on the other hand, still inhabit a pronounced Clausewitzian world where war is the continuation of politics by other means, but where, politics remains supreme. Nuclear weapons to the Russians are therefore about politics rather than about warheads; about prestige rather than about casualties; about power on earth rather than Mr Brezhnev's hypocritical reference to God. The Russians have devleoped nuclear weapons not to replace their traditional strategy, but to enhance it.
In the West, we have become prisoners of this nuclear arithmetic, meaningless though it is when both the US and the Soviet Union have more than enough weapons for any variation in all their potential strategies. However, on any other normal modern criterion, the Russians are not equal in power to the United States. Their country does not work; their empire is unstable; their insecurity is real and pathological since the Communist Party lacks legitimacy in its own country and knows it. That is why Russian diplomacy tries so hard to proclaim some universal revolutionary ideal, long since repudiated by them in favour of the neo-Tzarist dictatorship of the ailing Mr Brezhnev, and his privileged Party members.
The only thing which gives the impression that the Soviet empire has any right to claim equality with American power is that it is judged on the basis of who has the most missiles and divisions under arms. It is true that the military sector in Russia is the most well-endowed sector in the economy. It is cossetted from the poverty and inadequacy of the system, insulated from its inefficiencies, buoyed up by its sheer exuberance and self-importance above the cynicism of so much if not all of the rest of Soviet enterprise.
But, with all the evidence of the Soviet Union's obsessive militarisation before us, we should not be deluded in Europe into thinking that SALT is about peace. It may have given the Americans a chance to assess the value of embarking on new weapons programmes in the light of the plans which they know the Soviets have. If, for instance, this treaty had been signed earlier the Americans might have been able to avoid embarking on the MX programme which was itself a counter-system to a new Soviet armament. On the Russian side the treaty assuages their obsession with world status and their desire to be considered coequal with the greatest power on earth. So, to the extent that SALT might reduce American spending on defence, and therefore help to lower inflation, its effect on Europe's economies would be favourable. But such minor advantages must be set against the emphasis it gives to a balance of power tilting in Russia's favour. That can only be of concern in Britain, France and West Germany.
The reaction in Europe should be to see that SALT III corrects this trend, even if the damage of SALT II cannot be stifled at birth. Nine bilateral summits were preceded by four multilateral ones between the Western allies and the Soviet Union — the last at Geneva in 1955. It is time to recognise that the world of strategic nuclear weapons is now no longer a bilateral world, and SALT III should not be confined to bilateral talks between the Russians and the Americans; nor should it be limited to Britain and France, as the only other military nuclear powers within the Western alliance. The second and third most powerful countries in the world are Japan and West Germany. It is no longer valid to say that they do not have nuclear weapons simply because the rest of the world would disapprove of attempts to acquire them. They have the power to develop these weapons, but choose not to do so because they believe they have military guarantees from the United States which would make such developments unnecessary. The one way to maintain them in this non-nuclear state would be to treat them as though they already have such weapons, rather than to be apparently withholding special secrets and privileges from them. They should be asked to take their seats at the table to discuss SALT III along with Britain, France and China. Anything less than that would smack of a phoney arrangement between the two major nuclear powers hoping to maintain a duopoly, which only makes sense if the two parties believe their bilateral dealings matter more to them than does the rest of the world.
Previous page
